Thankfully, the disaster scene involving 29 mutual aid partners and more than 70 casualties wasn't real. The full-scale mock airport drill is
required every three years by the Federal Aviation Administration to test emergency
responses for communication, fire and police, medical services, hospitals,
mutual aid and the incident command system.

To make the training exercise appear more realistic, dozens of limping victims sported tattered clothing and fake injuries, including third-degree burns,
open bloody gashes, severed arteries and broken bones.

Sprawled out on the hot concrete
runway, some of the nursing students from Oakwood University and the University
of Alabama in Huntsville who volunteered to be victims moaned in pain as they waited to be rescued and transferred
to area hospitals for treatment.

"Not only are we trying to test our resources, but we're trying to
give other agencies the opportunity to test their resources," said Airport
Director of Operations Kevin Vandeberg. "And as we transition from on-the-scene
response and actually transport victims down to the hospital, they will start
their mass casualty response drills and plans."

Huntsville
International Airport averages about 70 regularly-scheduled flights per day,
which include arrivals and departures and passenger and cargo operations. About
eight of the 70 daily flights are cargo-related.

The live drill in Huntsville involved a Boeing 717 aircraft that crashed at the
airport at 9:17 a.m. Airport spokeswoman Chantel Minish said the mock
Delta flight traveling from Atlanta to Huntsville carried 108 passengers,
including six crew members.

A passenger inquiry phone number was established
following the crash and family members of victims were asked to report to
the executive salon at Four Points by Sheraton Hotel on the second floor of the
airport terminal.

Instead of using an actual plane for the simulation, airport officials took an old fuel tank, cut out windows and doors and added plastic evacuation slides to give it characteristics similar to a real aircraft.

Victims were kept away from the aircraft simulation in an attempt to avoid what happened in San Francisco earlier this summer when an Asiana crash victim was struck and killed by an emergency vehicle following the disaster.

Operated by Huntsville International Airport's public
safety division, four specialty Aircraft Rescue Firefighting trucks carrying foam and dry chemicals flooded the scene of the accident. One
vehicle featured a "snozzle," which is an aluminum skin-piercing tip that can penetrate
the aircraft's cabin, disperse agent and give victims an opportunity to
evacuate in the event there is an interior fire and rescue workers can't access
the plane.

The full-scale simulation, which involved between 275 to 300 people, allowed the airport to test its social
media and media dissemination procedures in the event of an aircraft emergency.

"As with any drill, you want things to happen as realistic as they
can," Minish said. "We had a few hiccups today, but overall, from the media
side and the communications standpoint, it worked the way we wanted it to."

Vandeberg said the formal evaluation with comments won't be available for another week. The airport plans to reconvene
with its mutual aid agencies in a month to go over an improvement plan on its
three main areas of focus: communication, the triage system for survivors and media
relations.